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Florida Scott-Maxwell
So Near Mystery / A flight of questions on age
The Listener vol. 51, no. 1307 (March 18, 1954) : 478-479
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There is a new concern felt for the old, and much is being done for them. Many people, especially the young, speak of the old as though they were a problem for others but not for themselves. We are a problem and we are a burden, but I think it is mostly on the practical side that we want help from the young. On the inner side it is naturally the old who can best communicate with the old. No young person would believe that age can be absorbing, but to some of us it is. We are immensely busy with it, busy summing up and busy letting go. Because I am old I want very much to compare notes on having lived, and on not having lived enough. I want to ask a great many questions. These could also have meaning for those who are taking that brave step into the forties, and even perhaps for the less than forties. They are all looking forward, and it might prove useful for them to see age looking back.
      We old people are usually puzzled by the road we have come. To chart that road even roughly seems to us a creative act, and as it may be our last creative act we must not miss it. My first question — and it is a whole flock of questions — is: ‘Have you got what you wanted out of life. Did you have some particular aim and did you achieve it? Were you one of the fortunate people who knew what you wanted, or one of the less fortunate who never found out?’
      My second question goes beyond all these: ‘Do you feel that you really lived your life?’ You may say that your life lived you, but then it was lived, so you escaped that dreadful sense of not having lived. Even to suspect that you only existed makes this a painful question. Yet how is an answer to be found? If one is to measure by the risks one took, then the answer is surely ‘I tried to live my life’. But who among us us did not have forces that tore about inside without ever finding their outer form? So a true answer might be ‘I lived a part of my life’. That is something, indeed much, and nothing would make me ask ‘Was what you lived all of you there was?’ I should expect a chorus of denial. A shout of ‘There was more, there was much more’ — and I would join in that shout.
      My third question must be a double one: ‘Do you know what good things you lacked, and what good things you possessed?’ That could take a very long time to answer. For one person may have had close friendships and varied encounters. Another may have so learned isolation that he found himself, and impersonal truths beyond himself. Thre is more to this question, and it runs so: ‘Do you see what it was in your nature that brought you the good things you had, and what it was that deprived you of those you missed?’ I, for one, can see that I did not merit many of the things I coveted, and the other things that came had, at times, a simple rightness about them, as though they fitted and I must use them. But I am ashamed to think how often the good things happened in spite of my efforts to stop them, since in my blindness they looked bad and not good.
      The fourth question I began asking myself when I was forty, that is thirty years ago. My fortieth birthday stirred me greatly. I seemed to have reached a point where I could look forward and back. I was seized by a need to know how I had got to where I was, and what the hazardous journey had done to me. I felt like whatever it is that lives inside a shell, and miraculously creates the dull or fantastic shape of the shell. I had no idea what shape I was making or whether I was already trapped in the pattern. It was then that I became interested in [479] age. I began looking into every old face that I saw, and sometimes I recoiled, and sometimes I longed to understand what had created such clearness and quiet.
      So now my question is, and it is a very tangle of a question: ‘Can you see the way you have come? Does the road make sense? Not clear sense, of course, but enough to convince you that there was a logic? If you take that long-known feeling of being you, that arrangement you have had to put up with for a lifetime, liking it no better than others did, but obliged to see it through to the end, if you add this to the circumstances in which you were born, and the manners and beliefs of the time, can you make out the interplay? Can you count the times when you were buffeted and others had their way with you? And can you count this against the times when you resisted, and out of refusal and loneliness, and an accepted difference, you found a new way, your way? And di you redeem a little of your weakest self? That one who may have been long in in the flow of the generations? Did you learn to know that weakling better? Do you feel there was a goal? And have you arrived, and can you rest there?’

‘The Gold of the World’s Storehouse’
      Living is such a struggle that it is small wonder if we do create something almost without knowing it. Objective creations are easy to see, books and ships and machines, homes and children and meals, but it is none of these creations that I seek. I mean qualities, indisputable qualities that are the gold of the world's storehouse, and that we make in living. The query could become so big that I retire quickly into a small and foolish simile. Everyone knows of the frog who fell into the pail of mil, and jumped so desperately in his effort to get out that he made a firm pat of butter, and standing on that he jumped out quite easily. So what I appear to be asking is: ‘Have you made your pat of butter?’
      I am afraid that any question is a hook, and my fifth question does seem to be very sharply barbed: ‘Do you know the things in you that are incurable? The things which you and everyone else dislike in you, and yet which you do continually?’ You may, for instance, feel distaste at the prejudice, or vanity, or bluntness on your tongue, yet you do finish your sentence with relish. It is as though your incorrigible side says: ‘I prefer vice to virtue, it’s more enjoyable’.
      If the questions up to now have seemed like a cloud of gadflies, I still doubt their taking one as far as Purgatory, but the sixth question could land one near there: ‘Do you know what sins you have sinned?’ Finding the true answer to this might be a searing experience, yet how shameful if we did not know where to ook for it. To hold this accounting is perhaps the right occupation of age. And it may be this very question that burns us clean.
      I am glad, however, that the next one is pleasant by contrast: ‘Do you like yourself more or less than you did when you when you were young?’ One flinches a bit at this, but there is much enjoyment to be had out of it. Surely everyone has a times felt utter distaste for himself. But then think of those other moments when it is delicious to be oneself. I do not mean enjoyment of other people or outside events, but those times when one’s own nonsense danced in one’s head: when alone in a railway carriage some sprite in the brain imagined being in a tiny canoe coming quickly along the runnel of water beside the line: or on a very small horse — or a very big one — you negotiated the obstacles of land and water at high speed, and with such captivating consequences that you are delighted with yourself as a travelling companion. Or — alone in one’s bedroom very early in the morning — the light softly dawning, flowers taking on colour, black shadows under the furniture, birds still, and the bond between you and the silence is so exquisite that it is balm to be you. And even if there is no liking for oneself there is a certain loyalty to the body and spirit that has survived so much, the body that bears no resemblance to its best period, yet bravely carries on. Poor body. And dear, dear spirit. How happy a thing that it has learned a little indifference at last. It has been long in doing it. One has to remember that the question is not ‘Do you like yourself?’ but ‘Do you like youself less or more than when young?’ Which is the same as though you said ‘Has living improved you, or ruined you?’ If you can say that it has done you a world of good, that tragic and entrancing as life has been, it has made a different being of you, far better than at times you dared hope — what a proud statement!
      Old people are so near mystery that for them almost any play of fancy makes sense, so the ninth question is: ‘Would you like to live your life over again?’ I one hear a man say that he would delight in reliving his life without a change. Few could echo that.
      The tenth question is the last. I would love to ask ‘Did you ever find out who you were?’; for it is not easy to know with so many surprising people inhabiting one. But I abandon that question and ask in its place ‘Would you like to live again, quite differently, and if so how and where?’ That to my mind does what an enjoyable question should do. It flings on so far that one might land anywhere. With no possibility barred, why, one could lose oneself at last. It is a blissful question. Not for the good of our souls, but for our diversion. And since the concerns of age can be so serious, how right that any unlived liveliness we may have left over should be used for our own amusement.
— Home Service
 

31 July 2026